Can Your Phone Help You Do IVF?

Can Your Phone Help You Do IVF?

Can Your Phone Help You Do IVF?

Could a new Web tool and phone app make it a little easier to get pregnant with IVF? A British research group says yes. The team has trawled through data from more than 140,000 IVF cases to create a Web tool and app that it says can predict, with extreme accuracy, the likelihood that the procedure will work for any given infertile couple.

Nelson and Lawlor recalculated, counting recent data on IVF births resulting from newer techniques like
intracytoplasmic sperm injection
, which can help overcome stubborn problems like low sperm mobility or impenetrable eggs. The new model almost flawlessly predicted whether a couple using IVF in the U.K. between 2003 and 2007 would deliver a child. Now these researchers have teamed up with
Tom Kelsey and Chris Jefferson
, computer scientists from the University of St. Andrews, to open their experimental methods to the public. Here’s their
Web-based prediction tool
. Coming soon, a mobile app for iPhone and Android phones called IVFPredict.

By answering nine questions about pregnancy history, the source of the eggs, and the types of fertility medications used, couples can find out their odds of successful IVF, as well as learn how each variable affects their risk profile. For instance, imagine a 33-year-old woman who’s never been pregnant and is using IVF for the first time after a year of trying to get pregnant on her own. Her fertility problems are caused by cervical issues, but she’s still using her own eggs (and has had gonadotropin hormone therapy treatment). According to IVFPredict, her chance of having a baby with her partner via in vitro fertilization is 13 percent. If the couple decides to go with intracytoplasmic sperm injection instead of the normal IVF method of combining multitudes of sperm and eggs in a dish, their odds jump to 42 percent, according to the model.